russia

A recent war game exercise revealed that, because of President Donald Trump’s flagging support for NATO, Europe’s nations would be vulnerable to an attack from Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces.

The German media outlet WELT collaborated with the German Wargaming Center of the Helmut-Schmidt-University of the German Armed Forces to conduct the exercise on Dec. 1, 2025, according to a report by Politico. As the theoretical exercise continued over several days, Russia crossed the Lithuanian border and openly menaced the rest of Eastern Europe. NATO and America’s larger post-World War II alliance with Europe would make the United States responsible for defending Europe from attack, but the war gamers instead played out a scenario in which Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to do so.

“The National Security Strategy of November 2025 states that the era of the United States acting as the sole guarantor of the global order is over,” Politico reported, describing how the war gamers implemented Trump’s articulated foreign policies. “The document then ranks America’s strategic priorities. First comes the Western Hemisphere. Second is Asia, which primarily refers to China and the Indo-Pacific. Europe comes in a distant third.”

The war gamers found that while Rubio would stay in touch with both sides, he would claim his main priority would be avoiding getting pulled into another war with Europe.

“People are raising all sorts of concerns about whether the United States is going to get wrapped up in a conflict that frankly we thought had been addressed several months ago,” the Rubio impersonator told the panicked Europeans in the war game. Even after Germany, Poland and the NATO Secretary General explained they were facing literal attack by Russia, the Rubio analogue reiterated, “We don’t want to do anything that might call into question the work that has been done to create a broader basis for a constructive relationship with Russia, including economically.” The result is that Washington refused to sanction Russia or even discuss Article 5 of NATO, which pledged the nations to each other’s mutual security.

“The simulation ended with many questions left unanswered,” Politico concluded in their report. “Does Russia fully hold the corridor? Does NATO eventually activate its defense plans? Can Europe act without the United States? Does the German brigade ultimately fight? Would a Russian advance succeed in reality? None of this is resolved.” Nevertheless, it did make one point “clear: Deterrence does not fail at the moment of escalation. It fails long before.”

This is not the first time that Europeans have raised the alarm about Trump’s foreign policy. On Wednesday the British publication The Guardian ran an in-depth profile of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Susan B. Rogers. Rogers is “arguably… the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies,” supporting far-right parties and politicians like AfD in Germany, UKIP in the United Kingdom, Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

Similarly on Monday the Munich Security Conference, widely regarded as the world’s top independent foreign policy forum, warned that Trump’s “wrecking ball” approach to foreign policy is putting the continent at risk.

“Transactional deals may well replace principled cooperation, private interests may increasingly trump public ones, and regions may become dominated by great powers rather than governed by international rules and norms,” the report authors warned. Meanwhile Sara Bjerg Moller of the magazine Foreign Affairs wrote that the United States’ own foreign policy goals may be undermined by weakening its alliance with Europe.

“[The United States] will find that walking away from overseeing NATO’s military machinery is far harder than anticipated,” Moller wrote. “NATO’s command structure was built around US infrastructure and personnel, and no other member of the alliance is currently equipped to replace Washington.”